Insulin does not control weight loss.

Kevin Hall performs both theoretical and experimental studies in human metabolism at the NIDDK of NIH. This week, he and colleagues published an article in Cell Metabolism entitled, "Calorie for Calorie, Dietary Fat Restriction Results in More Body Fat Loss than Carbohydrate Restriction in People with Obesity."

I think it's going to piss some people off.

For this reason, I decided to get my facts straight before writing about the study. Dr. Hall gave me some time on the phone earlier today. But before I get to his explanations, let me set up why, in diet research circles, this study is likely to have a large impact.

This is just a fun question someone asked on Quora. It leads into a few interesting topics. First the ISS just isn't heavy enough for a satellite to enter into a true gravitational orbit around it. But, in theory at least, you can put a satellite into a temporary  orbit that looks from the point of view of the ISS as if it is in orbit around it.

For a while. It's not kept in place by any gravitational attraction to the ISS, so it is sort of an illusory orbit you could say in a way - but perhaps it is interesting.

By Joel Shurkin, Inside Science — Wine grapes specially bred for extreme temperatures may have a future, despite any laughs connoisseurs might have at the thought of wine labels extolling the virtues of the terroir of Deadwood or Fargo.

A grape-breeding project that already has pumped more than $400 million into northern states’ economies and created as many as 13,000 jobs is trying to grow wine grapes where summers are short and winters brutal. Scientists who are breeding the grapes say the wine is improving every year.

If you care about the environment, you should eat the steak and throw out the salad, according to University of Missouri researchers who say that the type of food wasted has a significant impact on the environment. 

Approximately 31 percent of food produced in the U.S., or 133 billion pounds of food worth $162 billion, was wasted in 2011 according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Finally, Drummond had everything he’d ever dreamed of. He’d come a long way since he was a little boy, upset at his failure to get into the grammar school. That had been a great disappointment to his mother, and to his father, who was an engineer at a pharmaceutical company. His dad had never showed much interest in him as a child. He didn’t play with him and when he was naughty, he’d put him over the back of a chair and wallop him. That’s just the way men were in those days. Your father was feared and respected. Dads were dads.

It's an old joke: Practical nuclear fusion power plants are just 30 years away -- and always will be.

Maybe sooner, this time. Advances in magnet technology have led researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. Practical fusion power, should it ever happen, could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource.

The key is new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils "just ripples through the whole design," says Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "It changes the whole thing."

A new psychology paper finds that people with high levels of autistic traits are more likely to produce unusually creative ideas.

The authors examined the relationship between autistic-like traits and creativity. While they found that people with high autistic traits produced fewer responses when generating alternative solutions to a problem - known as 'divergent thinking' - the responses they did produce were more original and creative. They say they are the first paper to claim a link between autistic traits and the creative thinking processes.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing developed a new cyber security analysis method that discovered 11 previously unknown Internet browser security flaws. Their findings were honored with the Internet Defense Prize, an award presented by Facebook in partnership with USENIX this week at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium.

Ph.D. students Byoungyoung Lee and Chengyu Song, with Professors Taesoo Kim and Wenke Lee, of Georgia Tech received $100,000 from Facebook to continue their research and increase its impact to make the Internet safer.